Duncan Garner’s column “Where’s that Brighter Future we were all promised” must be one of the worst researched and slanted pieces I’ve ever read.(26 August)

“When the Nats took command nine years ago they might as well have been presented with … the paralysing decade of deficits dished up by Labour.”

The term “decade of deficits” was coined by the National Party, not Treasury.

Treasury’s 2008 PREFU referred to deficits caused by “the sub-prime mortgage crisis, which developed in the United States in mid-2007, was the trigger for the unwinding of these imbalances and the world economy…this process of adjustment is expected to be protracted and to involve both developing and developed economies”.

In reality, Labour’s Finance Minister, Michael Cullen, posted eight budget surpluses in a row and paid down government debt. National, by contrast, increased debt to over $60 billion.

Cutting taxes in 2009 and 2010, National was forced to borrow even more.

Garner’s selective memory overlooks the GFC when he castigates “Labour’s never-ending golden economic summers had crashed, burned and disappeared” – but then excuses National’s “promise of a brighter future being ravaged by international economic cancers”!

No wonder the public distrust the media when a supposedly impartial journalist writes this kind of fake ‘news’.